Shridath Ramphal, Contributor
IF AMERICAN expectations (and interests) are allowed to guide the course of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations, they will have ended before CARICOM Heads meet in July next year.
Their forthcoming meeting in Jamaica could therefore be their last annual summit before being invited to sign on to a FTAA agreement. This timing has acquired critical implications.
The FTAA journey began at the Miami Summit of the Americas in 1994 and 2005 (when the agreement was planned to come into force) must then have seemed a long way off. However, much was expected to unfold in the time allotted to the negotiations.
In particular, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was to have managed a process by which, through global negotiation, world trade would have been brought under the sway of a new regime of rules and disciplines.
Under that global umbrella, the FTAA would be 'WTO-plus' in terms of its 'liberalisation' ambitions, but global WTO agreements would be the basic benchmark.
In September 2003, the Fifth WTO Ministerial will be held in Cancun in Mexico. Its immediate predecessors will have been Doha in 2001 and Seattle in 1999.
If those encounters, and the negotiations in Geneva since Doha, are a guide Cancun will not close the large divide between the industrialised countries on the one hand (the United States and Europe in particular) and the developing countries (including the 'emerging' economies) on the other.
POST-CANCUN
Post-Cancun, the struggle in the WTO to make 'global trade work for people' a struggle on which could depend the future of Caribbean people will continue for many a year.
It is a struggle in which the developing countries are very gradually making progress not in the sense of any major breakthroughs, but in changing the basic assumptions with which the global negotiations began under insistent pressure from the industrialised countries.
Those words, for example, Making Global Trade Work for People form the title of a major study just published by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Its analysis and conclusions would have been heresy 10 years ago as the WTO negotiations were launched to the mantra of 'liberalisation' though there were 'heretics' warning even then.
More specifically, the study provides authoritative support for basic developing country contentions in the WTO negotiations.
Together, those contentions argue for key reforms in the global governance of trade and hence in the over-arching regime of rules and disciplines which the WTO must secure. They include such matters as:
The basic WTO single undertaking mandate compelling Governments to accept agreements as a complete package rather than on an individual basis - unique among multilateral institutions. The fundamental issue of special and differential treatment for developing countries going beyond traditional trade issues to such matters as education, energy, health care, technology transfers, gender equality, environmental protection, cultural integrity and diversity, and the right to use traditional knowledge to promote human development. Governance structures and decision-making in the WTO itself which have failed to realise the promise of a democratic inter-governmental organisation and where there is widespread agreement that the least developed countries and small-island
developing countries require support to bolster their representation and capacity in Geneva. Dispute settlement arrangements where experience has shown the relative weakness of developing countries because their threat of retaliation (a fundamental feature of the 'sanctions' system) is patently not credible. The WTO agenda itself which developing countries contend is already too full and argue that priority should be given to the many reforms needed in the global governance of trade and on agreements already being negotiated, like agriculture and services. Overburdening the agenda with new issues, such as 'investment', 'competition policy', 'trade facilitation' and 'government procurement' (the four Singapore issues) pose insuperable problems of capacity for dealing with such large, diverse and complex issues.
The basic issue of the relationship between WTO Negotiations and Regional Trade Agreements specially relevant to the FTAA the contention being that WTO rules should provide the overall boundaries for regional agreements, with those rules being first made more flexible and development friendly.HARMFUL
It follows that an FTAA process which runs ahead of WTO negotiations but falls short of them in quality is not only strategically imprudent for the Caribbean, but ultimately harmful at the global level. All of the 'Singapore issues', for example, are being actively pressed in the FTAA negotiations.
These difficulties are compounded for the Caribbean by its triadic negotiating situation. Uniquely among countries, both developed and developing, the Caribbean is negotiating actively on three fronts the WTO, the European Union (Cotonou) and the Americas (FTAA). The order of completion of these negotiations has now become a major strategic issue.
The danger is that the Caribbean is being pressed to complete first the negotiations in which the region has the least leverage, namely, the FTAA.
Were the Caribbean to do so, it will have severely handicapped itself with the EU and at the WTO.
A review of Caribbean strategy in relation to the sequencing of its external economic negotiations seems both necessary and urgent.
It could not have been predicted earlier that what is emerging now would necessarily be the order of completion, namely, the FTAA first, the Cotonou Agreement next and then the WTO agreements. But now that it is clear that this is what the Caribbean is being pressed to accept it is essential that the Caribbean calls 'time out'.
There are others in the hemisphere, among them some major players, who will share the Caribbean's strategic interest in first securing a favourable outcome in the WTO and only then fashioning an FTAA which reflects global parameters.
The benchmarks of an FTAA, even one that is 'WTO plus', have changed fundamentally since 1994 and will go on changing as the validity of developing country arguments against free trade fundamentalism become more and more irresistible.
Concluding an FTAA now at the hemispheric level, without the benefit of developing country progress at the global level, cannot be in the strategic interest of the Caribbean and the rest of Latin America.
Yet the momentum of the 1994 Summit of the Americas (and two more since Santiago and Quebec) is carrying the negotiations forward as if nothing has changed at the WTO.
The pressure to conclude them before the next U.S. Presidential election in 2004 is unrelenting. In October 2001, the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick (in advancing the Administration's bid for Congressional 'fast-track' authority) linked the FTAA negotiations to the 'war on terror'. The Democrats objected to the 'linkage'; but it was not withdrawn. More pressure can be expected.
With Cancun in September and the fourth summit of the Americas scheduled for next year, the case for review is compelling. For CARICOM, it could be
life-saving.
Sir Shridath Ramphal is Chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI) and until recently was Chief Negotiator for the Caribbean Community in its external economic negotiations. He is a former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth.
